Research Areas

Mairi McLaughlin is Professor in the Department of French and an Affiliated Member of the Departments of Linguistics and Italian Studies. She specializes in French/Romance Linguistics and in Translation Studies. She has published extensively on language contact in French and Romance, on the language of the media, and on journalistic and literary translation. She has a particular interest in the language of the media, especially the role that it plays in language variation and change, the use that is made of reported speech, and the linguistic and textual effects of news translation. Mairi's first book, Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation was published by Legenda in 2011 and her second book, La Presse française historique: histoire d'un genre et histoire de la langue, was published by Garnier in 2021. She has just published a digital edition of the first periodical devoted to the French language itself, François-Urbain Domergue's Journal de la langue françoise soit exacte soit ornée (1784-1795) (McLaughlin 2022) and a critical paper edition of the same periodical is forthcoming with Garnier. Mairi is currently co-editing two volumes which will be published by Oxford University Press in 2023. With Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh, Mairi is editing Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French and with Wendy Ayres-Bennett, she is editing The Oxford Handbook of the French Language.

Selected Publications

“Morphology and Syntax” in The Oxford Handbook of French, ed. by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Mairi McLaughlin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, in press, to appear 2024.

“French and its varieties: disciplinary perspectives and new horizons”, co-authored with Wendy-Ayres-Bennett, in The Oxford Handbook of French, ed. by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Mairi McLaughlin, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2024.

“Women and Language in the Journal de la langue françoise (1784-1795)”, in Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, ed. by Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin and Olivia walsh, Oxford: Oxford University Press, to appear 2024.

“New directions in the history and sociolinguistics of French”, co-authored with Janice Carruthers and Olivia Walsh, in Historical and Sociolinguistic Approaches to French, ed. by Janice Carruthers, Mairi McLaughlin and Olivia Walsh, Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2024.

“Translation and the Press”, co-authored with Nicholas Brownlees, in The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Vol I 1640-1800, ed. by Nicholas Brownlees, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023, pp. 384-403.

Journal de la langue françoise, soit exacte soit ornée (1784-1795) by François-Urbain Domergue, in Grand Corpus des grammaires françaises, des remarques et des traités sur la langue (XIVe-XVIIIe s.), Paris: Garnier, 2022.

The Future of Translation in Higher Education (2022, Special issue of L2 Journal 14/2) https://escholarship.org/uc/uccllt_l2/14/2

La Presse française historique: Histoire d’un genre et histoire de la langue, Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2021.

“La Représentation de l’oral dans la Gazette d’Amsterdam à la fin du XVIIIe siècle”, Langages, special issue: ‘L’oral représenté en diachronie et en synchronie: que nous apprend-il sur l’oral spontané?’, ed. by Florence Lefeuvre and Gabriella Parussa, 217, 2020, pp. 133-146.

“When Romance meets English”, in Manual of Romance Sociolinguistics, ed. by Wendy Ayres-Bennett and Janice Carruthers, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 644-73.

“Why Retranslate the Classics? Griselda in French from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century”, co-authored with Linda Louie and Diana Thow, in Cultural Reception, Translation and Transformation from Medieval to Modern Italy. Essays in Honor of Martin McLaughlin, ed. by Guido Bonsaver, Brian Richardson and Giuseppe Stellardi, Oxford: Legenda, 2017, pp. 52-68.

“Prolégomènes à l’étude des idéologies et attitudes linguistiques dans la presse périodique sous l’Ancien Régime”, Circula : revue d’idéologies linguistiques, 1, 2015, pp. 4-25.

“Etat présent: Translation Studies”, French Studies, 68(iii), 2014, pp. 377-85.

“Le Genre sexué et le discours rapporté dans les dépêches d’agences de presse”, in Discours rapporté, genre(s) et médias, ed. by Françoise Sullet-Nylander, Malin Roitman, Juan-Manuel Lopez-Muñoz and Laurence Rosier, Stockholm: US-AB, 2014, pp. 145-59.

“News Translation as a Source of Syntactic Borrowing in Italian”, The Italianist, 33(iii), 2013, pp. 443-63.

“L’Oralisation et le discours rapporté dans les dépêches d’agences de presse”, Le discours et la langue, 2.2, 2012, pp. 89-98.

Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation, Oxford: Legenda, 2011.